The National Emergency Library Makes 1.5 Million Books Free to Read Right Now
The coronavirus has closed libraries in countries all around the world. Or rather, it’s closed physical libraries: each week of struggle against the epidemic that goes by, more resources for books open to the public on the internet. Most recently, we have the Internet Archive’s opening of the National Emergency Library, “a collection of books that supports emergency remote teaching, research activities, independent scholarship, and intellectual stimulation while universities, schools, training centers, and libraries are closed.” While the “national” in the name refers to the United States, where the Internet Archive operates, anyone in the world can read its nearly 1.5 million books, immediately and without waitlists, from now “through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later.”
“Not to be sneezed at is the sheer pleasure of browsing through the titles,” writes The New Yorker’s Jill Lepore of the National Emergency Library, going on to mention such volumes as How to Succeed in Singing, Interesting Facts about How Spiders Live, and An Introduction to Kant’s Philosophy, as well as “Beckett on Proust, or Bloom on Proust, or just On Proust.” A historian of America, Lepore finds herself reminded of the Council on Books in Wartime, “a collection of libraries, booksellers, and publishers, founded in 1942.” On the premise that “books are useful, necessary, and indispensable,” the council “picked over a thousand volumes, from Virginia Woolf’s The Years to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and sold the books, around six cents a copy, to the U.S. military.” By practically giving away 120 million copies of such books, the project “created a nation of readers.”
In fact, the Council on Books in Wartime created more than a nation of readers: the American “soldiers and sailors and Army nurses and anyone else in uniform” who received these books passed them along, or even left them behind in the far-flung places they’d been stationed. Haruki Murakami once told the Paris Review of his youth in Kobe, “a port city where many foreigners and sailors used to come and sell their paperbacks to the secondhand bookshops. I was poor, but I could buy paperbacks cheaply. I learned to read English from those books and that was so exciting.” Seeing as Murakami himself later translated The Big Sleep into his native Japanese, it’s certainly not impossible that an Armed Services Edition counted among his purchases back then.
Now, in translations into English and other languages as well, we can all read Murakami’s work — novels like Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore, short-story collections like The Elephant Vanishes, and even the memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running — free at the National Emergency Library. The most popular books now available include everything from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale to the Kama Sutra, Dr. Seuss’s ABC to Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (and its two sequels), Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to, in disconcerting first place, Sylvia Browne’s End of Days: Predictions and Prophecy About the End of the World. You’ll even find, in the original French as well as English translation, Albert Camus’ existential epidemic novel La Peste, or The Plague, featured earlier this month here on Open Culture. And if you’d rather not confront its subject matter at this particular moment, you’ll find more than enough to take your mind elsewhere. Enter the National Emergency Library here.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Spring Break vs. COVID-19: Mapping the Real Impact of Ignoring Social Distancing
Yesterday, the United States surpassed China, becoming the world leader in COVID-19 infections. It’s not hard to understand why. Social distancing remains very uneven. Domestic travel continues unchecked. Asymptomatic carriers stay on the move. Starting on the coasts, COVID-19 is now moving inexorably across the nation, coming to a city or town near you.
If you want to get a glimpse of how COVID-19 can spread, watch this clip from Tectonix GEO. It uses data from anonymized mobile devices to trace the movement of Spring Break partiers who congregated at one single Ft. Lauderdale beach, then moved back across the United States, in each case potentially bringing the virus with them. It’s a quick case study showing how an infectious disease can spread through a country that wants to remain mobile come hell, pandemic, or high water.
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Read More...Patrick Stewart Is Reading Every Shakespeare Sonnet on Instagram: One a Day “to Keep the Doctor Away”
He is a “geek cultural icon”: Captain Picard and Professor X. We’ve heard him gamely voice a ridiculous animated character in American Dad. We know him as an advocate for victims of domestic violence, a tragic reality he witnessed as a child. There are many sides to Patrick Stewart, but at his core, Shakespeare nerds know, he’s a Shakespearean. Maybe you’ve seen him in 2010’s Ceaușescu-inspired Macbeth or the 2012 BBC production of Richard II, or as Claudius in 2009’s televised Royal Shakespeare Company Hamlet, with David Tennant in the title role?
Only the most enviable nerds, however, have seen him live on stage with the RSC, in any number of roles, minor and major, that he has played since joining the company in 1966. He’s as august a Shakespearean actor as Olivier or Gielgud. So, imagine Olivier or Gielgud reading a Shakespeare sonnet to you every day, right in the comfort of your own home. Maybe even better (some might say), we have the mellifluous Stewart delivering the goods, to soothe us in our days of isolation.
After receiving a very enthusiastic response when he “randomly and elegantly recited Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 to his fans on social media,” writes Laughing Squid, Stewart “decided to read one Shakespeare sonnet aloud each day in hopes of ‘keeping the doctor away.’” Think of it as preventative medicine for the itchy, cooped-up soul. On his Instagram, Sir Patrick shows up lounging comfortably in casual clothes, furthering the illusion that he’s joined us in our living rooms—or we’ve joined him in his.
View this post on Instagram
Where the intimacy of celebrity social media can sometimes feel cloying and insincere, Stewart seems to feel so genuinely at home with his setting and his text that we do too. The actor occasionally adds some brief commentary. In his reading of Sonnet 2, above, he says before beginning, “this is one of my favorites.”
When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery so gazed on now,
Will be a totter’d weed of small worth held:
Then being asked, where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days;
To say, within thine own deep sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserv’d thy beauty’s use,
If thou couldst answer ‘This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,’
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.
Maybe we all feel we’re growing old in the boredom and anxiety of our new siege-like conditions. The poet urges us to make the most it. Sure, plenty of people are already engaged in making children, without any help from Shakespeare or Patrick Stewart, but those who aren’t might decide to work on other legacies that will outlive them.
Stewart tells Variety that his only regret during his time with the RSC is that he “might have perhaps been a rather bolder, pushier and more extravagant actor.” But it’s his understatement and subtlety that make him so compelling. He also says that his first year with the RSC was, “at that point, the happiest year of my working life,” though he was only cast to play small roles until he was made an Associate Artist in 1967, just one year after joining.
View this post on Instagram
He worked alongside a “new nucleus of talent” that included Helen Mirren and Ben Kingsley and remained exclusively with the company until 1982. (See a young Stewart as Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream production from 1977.) Stewart returned to the stage with the RSC often, and while his Instagram readings are hardly comparable in scope and intensity to his Shakespearean work on stage and screen, they have proven a true balm for lovers of Shakespeare’s poetry, as read by Patrick Stewart as a loveably bookish homebody, which turns out to be an unsurprisingly large number of people.
If you’re in dire need of such a thing—or just can’t miss the opportunity to see one of the greatest living Shakespearean actors read all of the Sonnets in his sweats—check in with Stewart’s Instagram to get caught up and for the latest installment, and follow along with poems here. For even more Shakespearean Stewart geekery, read his recollection of his 1965 Royal Shakespeare Company audition—in which company co-founder John Barton had him perform Henry V’s famous Agincourt speech four times in a row before inviting him to join.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks: The 2020 Edition
Back in 2014, this image won a contest on a subreddit devoted to Blender, “the amazing open-source software program for 3D modeling, animation, rendering and more.” (You can download the free software here.) The image riffs, of course, on Edward Hopper’s classic 1942 painting, “Nighthawks,” taking its theme of loneliness to new extremes–extremes that we’re just starting to get accustomed to now.
Find lots of background information on the original “Nighthawks” painting in the Relateds below.
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Read More...
How Patti Smith “Saved” Rock and Roll: A New Video Makes the Case
Rock and roll has always had its huge stars: from its earliest beginnings as a cultural phenomenon of interracial and sexual anxiety, to its turn as the soundtrack of free love, good drugs, and civil unrest. By the early 70s, however, Polyphonic argues above, the music of rebellion had “lost its way,” become the province of superrich superstars in private jets and French chateaus. As the 60s crashed and burned with the deaths of major figures like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison, the 70s dawned as an era of rock and roll excess to a degree that fully betrayed the music’s scrappy, teenage roots.
Punk, as the story goes, was born of backlash against the bloated, proggy state of affairs represented by the likes of Genesis; Yes; Emerson, Lake & Palmer; and so forth. While still musically leaner than these bands, the once scrappy Pink Floyd also succumbed to the trend of rock as musical theater—staging grand, expensive productions that required whole fleets to move from city to city. One iconic response, the Sex Pistols’ handmade “I Hate Pink Floyd” t‑shirt, seems to sum up punk rock’s general sneer in the direction of all rock stars.
Punk may have been a reaction, but it was not something other than rock and roll. Rather, it was a reclamation of rock’s spirit phrased in the idiom of the angry, crumbling, subversive 70s. At the center of punk’s CBGBs origins was “rock and roll warrior poet” Patti Smith and her debut, Horses, its unforgettable opening line a “radial declaration of youth, rebellion, and freedom.” (The line originated in an early poem, “Oath.”) Once Smith delivers her statement of intent, she and the band launch into “Gloria,” a garage-rock staple by Van Morrison’s 60s garage band, Them.
Smith explicitly connected her musical revolution to the three-chord proto-punk of ten years earlier, just as Iggy and the Stooges warped the meanest expressions of 60s rock into music that more accurately reflected the state of the Motor City. Her sound was pure downtown New York, with its hustlers, schemers, and dreamers, a distillation of rock’s essence, filtered through the seedy poetry of the Bowery.
There were many others—Richard Hell and the Voidoids, The Ramones, forgotten but significant bands like Pure Hell—whose sound was more prototypically punk. Smith was there before punk, living the life she writes of in Just Kids, hanging out with Bob Dylan and Allan Ginsberg, bridging the 60s and 70s while radically recovering rock’s racial and sexual transgressions and turning them on their patriarchal heads. In Smith’s version, “the lyrics and performance of ‘Gloria’ were overt challenges to perceptions of sexuality and gender.” After her came dozens of punk frontwomen who did the same, playing roles previously reserved for male rock stars.
Unlike the Sex Pistols, Smith did not spit in the eye of the rock stars of the past. She eulogized them in the sweaty downtown clubs of mid-70s New York City, in a scene happy to jettison rock’s past. Despite her unshakable title as the “godmother of punk,” Smith insists “I was not really a punk, and my band was never a punk rock band.” She is an artist and a poet who played rock and roll. And while she might not have “saved” the music, as Polyphonic claims, she certainly helped preserve it for the first punk audiences and first wave of punk bands, achieving her goal of passing the spirit of the counterculture to the next generation.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Bill Gates Describes His Biggest Fear: “I Rate the Chance of a Widespread Epidemic Far Worse Than Ebola at Well Over 50 Percent” (2015)
What are billionaires afraid of? A wealth tax? Universal healthcare? Immigrants from several specific places in the world? Probably. But if you ask one billionaire, Bill Gates—who has spent the last several years spending money to combat deadly epidemics—he’ll answer with a very detailed description of a global threat to everyone, not just the handful of people in his (un)tax(ed) bracket: Pandemics like the 1918 Spanish flu, as he told Vox’s Ezra Klein in the 2015 video interview above. The disease infected around 27 percent of the world’s population and killed tens of millions of people from every social class.
Such events are highly probable, and we should be prepared for them. “I rate the chance of a widespread epidemic far worse than Ebola in my lifetime at well over 50 percent,” he says. In fact, Gates met with the president two years ago to urge federal action on pandemic preparedness. He was heard and ignored.
Now, as the CDC faces the spread of coronavirus in major cities around the country, it finds itself woefully unprepared for the task. “The truth is we’ve not invested, we’ve underinvested in the public health labs,” director Robert Redfield told Congress in recent hearings. “There’s not enough equipment, there’s not enough people, there’s not enough internal capacity….”
The situation looks bleak, but Gates was “optimistic” despite his predictions. And why shouldn’t he be? Klein wrote: “He’s one of the richest men in the world,” and he also “runs a foundation immersed in the world’s problems” and “can measure them getting better.” But a deadly pandemic remains “the most predictable catastrophe in the history of the human race,” writes Klein. Maybe Gates should have urged the government to prepare by explaining how it would boost the oil and hotel industries.
For those who can be persuaded by evidence of a possible pandemic’s effect on human lives, Gates modeled how a disease as deadly and infectious as the Spanish flu would act today. “Within 60 days it’s basically in all urban centers around the entire globe,” he says. “That didn’t happen with the Spanish flu.” He explains further in the TED talk above how the “greatest risk of global catastrophe” doesn’t look like a mushroom cloud but like the spiky microscopic ball of the influenza virus, or its equivalent. That may not be COVID-19, but whatever it is, Gates has been warning for years, we are not ready.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Watch 85,000 Historic Newsreel Films from British Pathé Free Online (1910–2008)
The “pivot-to-video” moment of a few years back devastated writers everywhere with mass layoffs as companies scrambled to attract projected millions of nonexistent viewers. It’s a story about predatory media monopolies and the proliferation of news, documentary, and opinion video content online. While the sheer amount of video can feel overwhelming, we might remember that people have been getting their news from screens for well over a hundred years.
First came the newsreels. Thousands were produced from the end of the 19th century into the 1960s, when TV became the dominant screen of choice. These were ephemeral, often fragmentary films, not usually preserved in the way of great cinema.
But while “the newsreel may be history,” notes the National Endowment for the Humanities, “vast collections of it remain, much of it unseen.” One such collection resides at the archives of British Pathé, “a treasure trove of 85,000 films unrivaled in their historical significance.”
British Pathé has digitized their collection and made all of it—including more than 136,000 items from the Reuters historical collection—freely available online at their website and on YouTube. You’ll find there exactly the kind of variety Richard Eder described in The New York Times in 1977, a year when people also felt “flooded” by news:
Most of the time [newsreels] were patchy views of a rather scatterbrained reality. Sneezing contests would alternate with politicians cutting ribbons and South Americans rioting.But once in a while there was something unforgettable: the Hindenburg floated loftily into sight and suddenly settled on the ground like burning tinsel; a middle-aged Frenchman wept at Toulon when the fleet was scuttled. The newsreel cameras and the big screen provided an authority to these things that television equipment couldn’t manage. Also there was the effect of waiting a day or two to see a disaster you had read of. World events were discrete, individual, weighty. They did not flood us.
British Pathé produced short documentary films on every possible subject around the world from 1910 to 2008 and might lay claim to capturing more unforgettable historical moments than most any other newsreel service of the era. A tiny sampling of newsreels in their massive digital archive includes the Beatnik makeover from 1963 at the top; a very brief film on Tolstoy; a longer featurette on the Titanic, with interviews from survivors; and a short on the psychedelic Mellotron.
Among the many “British Pathé Unissued” videos, we find the filmed interview clip below with H.G. Wells in the 1930s, in which he proposes disarmament, international cooperation, full public employment, and the nationalization of industry as antidotes to the rising tides of World War and devastating social inequality. The interview was “unused by Pathé editors and not screened in cinemas,” explains a title added at the beginning. One significant shift from the newsreel to the digital age is the unprecedented ability to bypass the censors.
“Before television” and the internet, as the archive description points out, “people came to movie theatres to watch the news. British Pathé was at the forefront of cinematic journalism, blending information with entertainment to popular effect.” If this blend sounds somewhat akin to the mass media world we inhabit today—one filled with proliferating video explainers, short documentaries, talking head conspiracy theorists and every other possible use of the form—perhaps it’s useful to remember that we’ve been living in that world a very long time. It has produced many thousands of artifacts that can tell us where we’ve been over the past 120 years or so, if not quite how we got to where we are now.
Enter the British Pathé collection on YouTube or their website.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Why New Diseases Like COVID-19 Keep Appearing in China
From Vox comes a short explainer that delves into why viruses like COVID-19 have often first taken off in China. They write:
As of early March 2020, a new coronavirus, called COVID-19, is in more than 70 countries and has killed more than 3,100 people, the vast majority in China. That’s where the virus emerged back in December 2019. This isn’t a new phenomenon for China; in 2003, the SARS virus also emerged there, and under similar circumstances, before spreading around the world and killing nearly 800.
Both SARS and COVID-19 are in the “coronavirus” family, and both appear to have emerged from animals in China’s notorious wildlife markets. Experts had long predicted that these markets, known to be potential sources of disease, would enable another outbreak. The markets, and the wildlife trade that supports them, are the underlying problem of these pandemics; until China solves that problem, more are likely to emerge.
Days ago, China’s wildlife-farming industry was permanently shut down by Chinese officials.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
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Read More...Meet the Liverbirds, Britain’s First Female (and Now Forgotten) Rock Band
We never ever got as famous as the Beatles. But we started as friends, and we ended as friends. —Sylvia Saunders, The Liverbirds’ drummer
John Lennon (a member of a band who in a parallel universe might’ve been billed as the male Liverbirds) announced that the all-female quartet would fail, a deeply inaccurate prediction.
The band got a lot of attention, toured with The Kinks and The Rolling Stones, dismissed Brian Epstein when he pooh-poohed their desire to play in Hamburg, rejected an offer to play topless in Las Vegas, and were sought out by Jimi Hendrix, owing to their bassist’s joint-rolling skills.
They also learned how to play the instruments they had optimistically purchased after seeing The Beatles in Liverpool’s famed Cavern Club.
Respect to any grandmother with bragging rights to having seen The Beatles live, but it’s heartening that these 16-year-old girls immediately pictured themselves not so much as fans, but as players.
As bassist and former-aspirant-nun Mary McGlory recalls in Almost Famous: The Other Fab Four, Ben Proudfoot’s New York Times’ Op-Doc, above:
“Oh my god!” I said to my cousins, “We’re going to be like them. And we’re going to be the first girls to do it.”
Mission accomplished, in trousers and neatly tucked-in shirts, buttoned all the way to their collars.
It’s not terribly hard to guess what put an end to their six-year-run.
Motherly, wifely duties…
Sylvia Saunders, who became drummer by default because sticks were a better fit with her small hands than frets, got pregnant, and recused herself due to complications with that pregnancy.
Valerie Gell, the Liverbirds’ late guitarist and most accomplished musician, married a handsome fan who’d been en route to Hamburg to propose when he was paralyzed in a car accident, devoting herself to his care for 26 years.
The other two members carried on for a bit, playing a Japanese tour with a couple of female musicians they’d met in Hamburg, but the chemistry couldn’t compare.
The dream was over, but fortunately rock and roll stardom was not their only dream.
Unlike the fourth Liverbird, Pam Birch, who descended into addiction after the band broke up, neither Saunders nor McGlory seems angry or regretful over what could have been, smiling as they mention their long, happy marriages, children, and grandchildren.
They were awfully tickled by Girls Don’t Play Guitars, a recent West End musical that tells the story of the Liverbirds.
And McGlory is admirably sanguine about Lennon’s famous diss, revealing to the Liverpool Echo that:
He had a smile on his face when he said it—he wasn’t being malicious. But it would have been nice to have bumped into him a few years later and for him to say, “Well done, you proved me wrong,” which I’m sure he would have been happy to do.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join Ayun’s company Theater of the Apes in New York City for her book-based variety series, Necromancers of the Public Domain, and the world premiere of Greg Kotis’ new musical, I AM NOBODY., playing at The Tank NYC through March 28 Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Watch Scenes from Czarist Moscow Vividly Restored with Artificial Intelligence (May 1896)
In May of 1896, Charles Moisson and Francis Doublier traveled to Moscow on behalf of the Lumière Brothers company, bearing with them the newly developed Lumière Cinématogaphe camera. Their purpose: to document the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II—the last Emperor of Russia, though no one would have known that at the time. The coronation was an extraordinary event, soon to be overshadowed by even more extraordinary events in the Revolutionary years to come. An enormous celebration followed, with gifts, bread, sausage, pretzels, beer, and a commemorative cup to revelers. The promise of these gifts led to what was later called the Khodynka Tragedy.
Hundreds of thousands descended on the city. Rumors that food was running short—and that the cups contained a gold coin—sent crowds rushing for the Khodynka Field. Overcoming 1,800 police officers, they caused a stampede that killed 1,389. That evening, Nicholas and the Empress Alexandra attended a ball, then visited wounded in the hospital the following day. One of the Tsar’s valets, Alexei Volkov, who survived the Revolution and lived to write his memoirs, described walking “along the Khondinka” and meeting “many groups of people coming back from that site and carrying the Tsar’s gifts. The strange thing, though, was that not one person mentioned the catastrophe, and I did not hear about it until the next morning.”
The stampede seems a testament to the poverty and desperation among ordinary Russians at the end of the 19th century. That history does not enter the frame in the minute of footage shot by Moisson and Doublier, which you can see recreated above in stunning detail—with both color added and in original black and white—by Denis Shiryaev. The footage is simply dated May 1896 and might have been shot either before or after the coronation. As Peter Jackson has done with footage from WWI in the feature-length documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, Shiryaev makes the grainy, blurry past come alive with the help of an “ensemble of neural networks,” as he writes on the video’s YouTube page.
The enhancements to the video transfer of the original film include:
1) FPS boosting – to 60 frames per second
2) Image resolution boosted up a bit with ESRGAN (general dataset)
3) Resorted video sharpness, removed blur, removed compression “artefacts”
4) Colorized (optional) – due to high request I have decided to include both versions of the processed video: colorized and black and white.
Boosting the frame rate to 60 fps especially gives these bustling and/or sauntering Moscow denizens of Tverskaya Street a lifelike appearance. (See here for a comparison of various frame rates). Whether you prefer color or black and white, it may be easy to imagine strolling down this cobblestone avenue yourself, dodging the dozens of horse drawn carriages passing by.
It may be harder to imagine that perhaps days or hours before or after this slice of Moscow city life, the last tsar of Russia was crowned, and a crowd of somewhere around half a million people rushed through the streets for a glass of beer and a free bite to eat. See more of Shiryaev’s AI-assisted film restorations at the links below.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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